Features

The city, however, does not tell its part, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities  

On April 28, 1938, the Western Massachusetts towns of Dana, Enfield, Prescott, and Greenwich received a notice informing them that they were no longer in existence. “By the terms of Chapter 321, Act 1927,” it began, “you are hereby notified that the corporate existence of the aforesaid towns ceased at 12 o’clock midnight, April 27th.” Town officers were instructed not to carry on any municipal functions after that date, only to do “such acts as are necessary to affect the transfer of properties of the municipalities to the Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission.” The letter was signed by R. Nelson Molt, the commission’s secretary.

This was no great surprise to the inhabitants of these towns. Some years before, the state of Massachusetts had decided to flood the area then covered by the four rural municipalities in a grand solution to the increasing need for water in the ever-growing greater Boston area. Residents of the Swift River Valley watched in disbelief as state officials, engineers, then surveyors, and eventually lumberjacks swarmed over their land and began the long process of taking it from them. The construction of the reservoir would be one of the most ambitious civil works projects in history, but it would result in the forced removal of all residents in each of the four communities.

The enormous Quabbin Reservoir (the name was taken from a Nipmuck word roughly meaning “place of many waters”) would supply water to Boston and the many burgeoning suburbs that had, at the time of the District Water Supply Commission’s decision, swelled to proportions that strained the resources of the city.

Historically, Boston had always struggled to bring in enough water to adequately supply its residents. It had first seen the need to reach outside its municipal boundaries for water as early as the late 1700s, when pipes were laid between the city and Jamaica Pond in Roxbury. Disputes some thirty years later led the city to look instead to Long Pond in Natick. Rapid industrial and population growth, however, soon necessitated diverting water from the Sudbury River, and when this proved futile, the subsequent creation of the Wachusett Reservoir on the Nashua River. This in turn would prove sufficient for only thirty years after its construction in 1908. A more sustainable answer to the water problem was desperately needed.

The creation of an enormous reservoir in western Massachusetts seemed to be an ideal—if grandiose—long-term solution: the topography of the Swift River Valley was such that a couple of well-placed dams at the southern end could turn the whole region (an area of roughly 40 square miles) into a gigantic bowl with the capacity to hold 412 billion gallons of water. Aqueducts and an impressive system of tunnels would move the water east to Boston and the suburbs, and all that would have to be cleared out in the process was a few small towns. The plan was, in many respects, a resounding success—the project created much-needed public works jobs during the depths of the Great Depression and today more than 2.5 million people draw their water supply from the Quabbin reservoir—but the success came at a great cost to 2,500 people who would lose their hometowns forever.